Ignoring the personal dig about my level of scientific understanding from someone who is neither evolutionary theorist nor biologist nor biochemist, I will point out that I have not “subsidized” Behe in any way, unless you count the tiny amount he gets per copy for the books of his that I have bought. And that tiny subsidy is more than worth it to me, as the publishing success of Behe’s books has atheists blowing gaskets all over the internet. Every rise in blood pressure of anti-ID bloggers, materialist biology professors, NCSE officials, etc. gives me no end of joy.
As for “lavish living,” I wonder how you know how “lavish” Behe’s lifestyle is when you’ve never seen his home, car, etc. But then, as you claim to know all about Behe’s personal motives without ever having spoken a single word with him or ever having met him, you probably can know all about his personal economic situation without ever having seen where or how he lives. As Paul Newman said in the bar scene in Harper, “You must be physic or somethin’.”
Interesting. Eddie here admits that his attraction to ID is fueled mostly by hostility to its opponents, especially atheists. It’s all about “owning the libs”! So much for his interest in science.
which in normal, relaxed conversation would be taken to mean that I was one of the people doing the subsidizing. If you want to “get technical” and say that the words don’t force the conclusion that I’m one of the subsidizers, you can score a pedantic victory, but you must be desperate for victories if you would stoop to such pedantry.
Are you going to offer any evidence that Behe has a “lavish” lifestyle, or are you just going to let that point quietly drop, due to lack of evidence?
As you’ve offered no credible rebuttal – in fact, no rebuttal at all – to my point that the Catholics and Jews at Discovery would not want to live in an America in which they would be second-class citizens after Bible-focused Protestants, and therefore would have no interest in creating a creationist theocracy in America, I’ll assume you intend to let that point drop, too. Of course, to anyone who has a wide acquaintance of practicing Catholics and practicing Jews, the point would have been obvious. I’ll draw the likely inference regarding your circle of close personal acquaintances.
How would you get “mostly” out what I wrote? In any case, you confuse “why Eddie enjoys puncturing anti-ID internet personalities” with “why Eddie is attracted to ID.” There are two distinct motivations involved, the one social, the other intellectual.
I’ve never heard this phrase before. Would you care to indicate what it means, or translate it out of slang into common English?
Not quote-mining, but quoting what you said. And correctly interpreting what it meant if you were writing in normal, conversational English. But if I am wrong in interpreting your words the way 95% of English speakers would interpret them, you are free, if you like, to confess that you expressed yourself poorly and restating what you were trying to say in better English.
Thankfully, if there is anyone who cares enough to want to check, they can easily read what I wrote in full and not just the fragment that you pulled out of context in order to distort its meaning.
And, of course, only our “Eddie” would chastise someone for failing to write in what he calls “normal, conversational English” immediately after he confesses ignorance of a common idiomatic phrase.
Admittedly, that’s a stretch. But it’s the only thing you mentioned, and both your glee and your hostility were palpable. Whatever it is, it doesn’t have much to do with science.
Google is, in some cases at least, your friend. I’m shocked you haven’t. Think Matt Gaetz, Lauren Bobert, Ted Cruz, etc. They were all elected pretty much for the purpose of “owning the libs”.
Imputing motives again! “in order to distort its meaning”? That implies that I was trying to distort the meaning. But I tried to do nothing of the sort. Even if I had quoted the full paragraph, your words might very easily have been read to include me among the subsidizers. You could have excluded that possible interpretation by writing more carefully.
Do you realize how often you impute motives (to me and others) without warrant? But then again, I guess that imputing motives to people is part of the stock-in-trade of your profession, so I suppose it comes naturally.
Nor do many of the culture-war statements uttered by Coyne, Scott, Matzke, Myers, Dawkins, etc. I give them back what they dish out.
You could have defined the term for me in fewer words than you just wrote. And I still don’t know what you mean by it, unless I take the trouble to do a search on the phrase. Which I have no intention of doing, when someone is deliberately being conversationally difficult.
Newton and Boyle did not live in the 21st century, but Behe and Jeanson do. I guess you can deduce the implications.
Ignorance about a lot of things made them and others say things like that. A good example is found in the fact that distinguished doctors prior to Semmelweis believed that bad odors caused disease, an idea that would draw the ridicule of most medical practitioners today. I ain’t gonna lie, sometimes I ridicule the doctors, but I always remember they were limited by the scientific state of affairs in their time.
No its not, as long as the person who thinks so only pushes for which is best supported by available evidence. I find Behe guilty of failing to do this, and can a learn a thing or two from how Swamidass is presenting his GAE thesis to the theological and scientific communities.
Why go for the unscientific idea that God did it, when there are natural explanations amenable to the methods of science?
Quote-mining is quoting what some-one says. Attempting to avoid a charge of quote-mining by pointing out the words were “what you said” rather than ‘what you meant’ is an admission of guilt.
I could have produced many more than three immediately. I was anticipating the pedantry and bickering nature of several people here, including yourself, who might say of some of the scientists that I named that they weren’t “major” scientists, or that they didn’t explicitly name the source of the teleology in nature as God, or that not enough of them were biologists (as opposed to, say, physicists or cosmologists), etc., and I was trying to put together a list that would please everyone.
For example, Fred Hoyle, a major scientist in the area of stellar physics in his day, came to the view that the universe looked very much as if “some superintelligence” had “monkeyed” with basic laws and constants so that life could take place; but if I used Hoyle, you or some wiseacre here would complain either that Hoyle wasn’t a biologist or that Hoyle never called the superintelligence “God.” And if I named scientists like Townes (laser) or Damadian (MRI), you or someone else here would complain that they were “applied scientists” or “technologists” rather than “pure scientists”, or again, that their field “wasn’t biology”, or the like. So I was trying to put together a list of people who would meet all the arbitrary criteria that might be thrown at it. But as you can see, I’ve already named three significant scientists who believed that there was some sort of “design” (or “teleology”) at work in nature, and those names came to me immediately.
No, not the same meaning – not in the vulgar popular usage which is generally the one employed by the atheists writing here. In that vulgar, popular usage, “God must have done it” means “God of the gaps.” And as I already explained, it isn’t a “God of the gaps” explanation to argue that a house (or a universe of a particular kind) requires an architect. Whether it’s a valid argument is another matter, but it’s not God of the gaps.
If you had proper training in the humanities, you wouldn’t have made the above criticism, because you would know better than to take an argument out of context. My response to Faizal was not intended to prove that Behe’s arguments were valid because Behe thought they were. My response was in the context of Faizal’s charge regarding Behe’s motivation. Faizal’s argument, put crudely, amounted to this (one that he and others here have used many times before): Behe does not admit he is wrong when he is wrong, so he must have religious motivation. And my response was that Behe doesn’t think the arguments against him are decisive, so there is no reason, from his point of view, why he should admit to being wrong. And if he really doesn’t think he is wrong, if he really thinks he is being not stubborn but more rational than his opponents, Faizal’s inference from his behavior (i.e., that Behe must have a religious motivation) falls to the ground.
Indeed, I explicitly stated that I was not trying to prove that Behe’s arguments were valid, and that I was challenging only Faizal’s reasoning about his motivation. If you read the entire set of replies to Faizal on which you are commenting, you will see my statements to this effect.
You’re such a nitpicker about exactly what words I and others use, and you so frequently complain about the alleged taking of words out of context, that I find it hard to believe that you did not notice or understand the context of my replies to Faizal, and I find it hard to believe that you did not notice that I said that I wasn’t defending Behe’s scientific arguments as valid, but only rejecting the conclusion that the motivation for his behavior must be religious. So that raises the question of your motivation. It would appear that your motivation is to score a verbal victory over me, no matter what I say about any topic – this being just the latest among hundreds of examples which point in that direction.
In graduate school, whenever a student in seminar behaved in argument the way you generally behave in argument against me, – determined to be in the right on every point, no matter how small, and determined to show that an opponent’s ideas and arguments have no value whatsoever – the student was dressed down, or more gently corrected, by the professor. But I guess you never had the experience of professors like that. Indeed, I would say, based on my experience here, that close to none of the atheists posting here had the experience of professors like that; or, if they did, they steadily rejected the corrections of such professors.